- So, for years we've been talking up external GPUs.
Specifically related to gamers.
But what about consumers and those in business?
Well, today, we're gonna talk about
the Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 graphics dock.
It's powered by an Nvidea GTX 1050.
Just around 400 bucks.
Today, I'll tell you whether it's worth it or not
and what are the pros and cons.
Stay tuned.
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Alright, before we get started here,
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Now let's talk a little bit about external GPUs.
So, they're a lot of fun.
Obviously Razer sort of set the trend here.
The downside of the external GPUs is their expense.
They cost around $300 to $400 dollars
just for the enclosure.
If you throw a GTX 1080 in there,
well, you could easily approach $800, $900 even $1,000.
So they've always been sort of cost prohibitive.
But the idea behind them is very interesting.
Well, Lenovo has taken that idea
and bring it to business users.
So, I wanna make clear here, this is not really
meant for gamers or regular consumers.
Although if you're a power user,
you should definitely consider it.
That's because this is using a GTX 1050
and that's not the most powerful GTX out there.
It's more focused on giving yourself a boost
over current devices, specifically
a ThinkPad X1 Yoga, or a Carbon
or something else that has a Thunderbolt 3 port.
Alright, looking at the graphics dock,
you can see it's very small.
Actually a lot smaller than I thought it would be.
You could easily toss this into
a bag or a suitcase for travel, which is nice.
It's also pretty light.
It's not hollow, but it's not completely solid either.
It is made from a plastic, and yeah,
you can scratch it, as you see I've already done.
But, overall, really solid build design.
In the front you have a three and a half millimeter
headset jack, you also have three
USB type A ports including 3.1 support.
You have an LED here, which is
gonna be red when the device is on
but the graphics card isn't running
and turns green when graphics is running.
It's a really nice touch, and
on the left hand side we have a Kensington port
so you can lock this down, which is
super important for offices and public areas.
Turning to the back here, you can see
the ventilation here for the GTX 1050,
which does have four gigabytes of
video memory on board, which is really nice.
You have an ethernet port, HDMI 2.0,
two display ports and a proprietary connector.
I should say, you can connect
up to three displays with this at the same time
all running 4K, and that's thanks to the GTX 1050.
And on the right-hand side,
you do get the Thunderbolt 3 port.
This is gonna be how you connect it
to your laptop or external PC.
You only get one type three port,
but that's it's main purpose.
And here at the bottom,
just see the intake here for ventilation.
You can see some of the piping for that GTX 1050.
Overall, really nice design, though.
I don't have any complaints here at all.
Now, despite being pretty small itself,
the charger is a little bit larger here.
Nothing is free after all.
And Lenovo does ship it with a 170-watt charger.
I always appreciate that Lenovo
just puts it right on the stamp there.
So this is the proprietary connector.
You're gonna need that power for all your displays,
and powering hard drives, whatever else
you're connecting up to this.
Plus, don't forget, this does charge
your laptop as you're using it
so you're gonna need plenty of power there
and it'll definitely give you that.
Alright, so what about the experience in using this?
So, Thunderbolt 3 is still kind of a weird technology.
What I mean is, in a scenario like this.
When you plug it in for the first time,
actually, it was kinda weird,
my Lenovo ThinkPad actually paused for a second
so the mouse cursor wouldn't move.
I was worried about that,
but it was actually just installing stuff.
Being a display dock, this actually
has a lot of things it installs
including drivers for audio and all the ports on board.
I should mention, you also need to install
the GTX drivers separately, at least I had to.
So I went to the Nvidea website,
downloaded Geforce experience, installed that,
and then it saw my GTX 1050,
installed the appropriate drivers for that,
and then everything was working.
There's still some weird issues here
that people need to realize.
For instance, when you plug in
an external graphics dock to your laptop,
if you don't want an external display
you can run it like that,
but you may run into some bandwidth issues
as you're sending the signal back and forth
through that single cable.
That's why most people use this, though,
in a scenario where you connect up
an external display, so now your display signal goes
all the way through the system and will use the GTX 1050.
I had no issues there once I did it.
In terms of actual raw performance,
it gets around 75,000 on Geekbench,
which is exactly what we expect from a GTX 1050.
In fact, that matches the Surface Book 2,
the 13-inch model which also has a GTX 1050.
So the performance was very good here.
Now, although I'm running this
on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon, I plugged it also
into the Huawei Matebook X Pro,
and that has a Thunderbolt 3 port
and it ran on there just fine as well.
That device gets a little tricky too
because it has an MX150 graphics card on it already
which is, you know, pretty mediocre.
And that's not even the good one,
that's the lower wattage version.
So now I had to uninstall the Nvidea system
and reinstall it, which then recognized the GTX 1050.
And again, now you have two cards on the system
so you need to run an external display
before you can use the GTX 1050 with it.
Otherwise it falls back to the MX 150.
There are some hacks around this.
You can disable the MX 150,
but it gets a little bit tricky.
This is what I'm talking about
with Thunderbolt 3 and external displays.
It gets a little, little weird on there.
That leads me to the question with gaming.
I know a lot of people are gonna ask about this.
Listen, a GTX 1050 is a nice card.
It gets your foot in the door for gaming.
You can do some stuff on there.
You can do PUBG,
you can do Killer Instinct,
and it will run much better than without it.
But really, what this device is for is productivity.
You can connect up to three 4K displays
to your ThinkPad X1 Carbon,
or any other device you may have and run it like that,
and get that extra graphics boost.
And that's really what it's for.
In that sense, it does very well
and I actually really enjoyed the experience.
Now, what about pricing?
So, retail price is $399, that's a little bit expensive.
But don't forget, when you look at
Thunderbolt 3 docks, they usually hover around $200 to $250.
Even Microsoft's own Surface dock is retail at $200
Speaking of Surface, this does not run on Surface.
There is no Thunderbolt 3 chip
on those devices so this is useless.
Sorry, folks.
We know the deal there.
Now, getting back to that pricing, though,
you can find this on sale for $370
at Tiger Direct and other websites.
You can even find some discounts
through Lenovo and get it for $340.
Now you're talking about a $100 difference for a GTX 1050
which I actually think is a pretty good deal.
So, if you're in the market for
something that gives your laptop an extra boost,
specifically, here, a ThinkPad or productivity machine,
you want to connect up multiple 4K displays,
I think this is a really solid option.
It's definitely gonna be cheaper than, say,
going out and buying a Razer Core.
Although that does give you more options.
You cannot swap out this video card, don't forget.
It's an all-one system.
But you do get the convenience of it.
You also get to throw this in your bag.
The Razer Core, as cool as it is,
you do not wanna take that in your suitcase.
It's way too big.
This, though, I could easily throw in my bag
even with that AC connector.
Overall, this is kinda cool stuff, right?
This is what we've been talking about wanting for years.
This is just the first of it.
I'm sure we'll see more of it in the coming years.
But you tell me what you think about this device.
Whether it's worth it or not,
and what you wanna see manufacturers do.
Are you actually going to buy an external GPU
or is it just the idea behind it?
Let me know.
Alright, so that does it for this review.
Now, if you want more information
about this device, you can head to Windows Central
where I have the full review written up there.
If you want more information on where to buy it,
head into the description.
Otherwise, we'll catch you next time in our videos.
Thanks for watching.
Take care, everybody.